Meta’s fact-checking reversal lets Mark Zuckerberg drop the charade

While it’s hard to fathom when exactly America’s culture wars began to take hold, it’s much easier to pinpoint the moment when Meta — still called Facebook at the time — became one of its central characters. Immediately after the 2016 election, Zuckerberg casually claimed that it was “crazy” to think that “fake news” on the social network had played a role in swaying the election in Trump’s favour. He was pilloried in the media.

He later said he was wrong to make those comments, but I’ve never believed he was sincere. With the brain of a software engineer, and the tendency to see the world in ones and zeros, Zuckerberg saw that news content was only a tiny portion of what was posted on Facebook, and misinformation only a small fraction of that. He felt the company was being made into a scapegoat for Trump’s victory. He was also smart enough to know that policing speech — whether misinformation or hate content — would put Meta in the impossible position of deciding what was true or fair.

But pressure mounted, and Zuckerberg knew he had to be seen to do something. He sought to outsource what he could, setting up an “independent” Oversight Board to make judgments on bigger-picture moderation questions, and launching a global fact-checking operation. This drew on the resources of large mainstream media companies but also smaller misinformation busters like Snopes and others.

Once the press buzz subsided, however, it became clear the scheme was underfunded, with tools not up to the task of handling the wads of misinformation being posted. Yet I suspect Zuckerberg — the engineer — always knew this was a system that could never work at scale. No number of fact-checkers, whether he paid for 10,000 or 10 million, could ever react quickly enough, or consistently enough, to quell the spread of misinformation. He also never wanted Meta to be seen as a publisher that was responsible for vetting the news it circulated.

Still, fact-checking served its purpose as a PR effort. That purpose no longer exists, so neither will the fact-checkers. Meta says it will instead introduce a feature similar to X’s Community Notes, where users can submit their own fact-checks. Spend 10 minutes on that disastrous site to see how well that is working, on a network with a user base several times smaller than Facebook’s.

Really, what the moment allows is for Zuckerberg to claim a different kind of victory by throwing in accusations that its fact-checkers were politically biased, to the delight some of those Meta opponents who are now back in government.

When I asked Meta for examples of this bias, to my surprise a spokesman sent me three: this story about a fact-check on the causes of inflation (which wasn’t inaccurate); another about a doctored picture of LeBron James (also not inaccurate); and this Financial Times column about the nuances of fact-checking more broadly. You have to look pretty hard for evidence of systemic political bias in those examples. Even if that’s what Meta saw, then the next question is why it didn’t do anything for so long — the last example is from 2021.

Now that the time is right — what Zuckerberg called a “tipping point” in attitudes toward speech online — the Meta CEO can finally speak his mind on the matter, clearly still smarting from the negative coverage in the wake of Trump’s first election. On Tuesday, he put that tone firmly on the record. “After Trump first got elected in 2016,” he said, “the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy.”

What we’re seeing in Silicon Valley, above all else, is a backlash to the accountability of the Biden era. A big part of that, as evidenced by his “legacy media” jibe, is Zuckerberg’s belief — shared by many in the tech business as though it were gospel — that editors and publishers sent reporters out like attack dogs to take down Meta’s business so that old media could somehow return to its glory years. It is ludicrous, of course, but it has given many tech leaders the excuse they need to treat bad press as disingenuous attacks rather than an examination of their actions and character. In Silicon Valley, every act of journalism is deemed a “hit piece.”

That press coverage led to uncomfortable and consequential government action. First were congressional hearings, which amounted to public billionaire floggings, particularly for Zuckerberg. Then came the regulations, most notably in Europe, with tighter controls and harsher punishments. Closer to home, antitrust matters have loomed, with regulators slowing down deals Meta has made or wanting to unwind them altogether.

By throwing in the right’s favourite imprecise buzzwords — Censorship! Secret courts! Political bias! Legacy media! — Zuckerberg is pandering to Trump and his circle and giving the impression that he, to use the right’s cringe worthy lexicon, has been “red-pilled.” In truth, Zuckerberg’s values don’t seem to have shifted at all: He wants the press to go away, regulators to get off his back, and the excuse to give up on safety measures he never believed in in the first place.

Credit: Bloomberg